Rasa Design Studio » Marketing

The debate between tableless and table-based designs usually take place in the dark, smoke-filled virtual rooms of design and marketing forums and rarely make it out into the open as anything more than one obscure item on a list of features for certain applications. The question, “is tableless better?” is not even asked, anymore from anyone seriously in the field of design and marketing. The answer, “yes, it is a lot better” has been proven time and time again.

Tableless Structure in design is better for marketing, SEO, file sizes styling. It’s cheaper to maintain by designers that got past their first HTML tutorial before hiring themselves out and sites designed tableless have a much faster turn-around time.

The performance of our Tableless XHTML/CSS osCommerce demo store shows the power of this type of web site as it relates to Google and this is the number one reason why the tableless mark-up was considered the main component of our rewrite of that application.

Some designers (the ones least comfortable with CSS) will claim that it nested DIV tags aren’t a real improvement to nested Tables and will point to sites such as CSS Zen Garden as a prime example of nested DIV’s. This misses the point of CSS Zen Garden, which was using the mark-up to be more flexible to ALL designers and not reduce file sizes or redundant coding… a point it makes clearly on the site. Further, the designers don’t suggest how they would be able to achieve such a vast array of designs from a single chunk of XHTML with tables. The same designers also ignore the pudding that the proof is really found in: Google.

Where all else is the same and the number of incoming links are the same, tableless sites consistently out-perform tabled sites in everything from seo, w3 specs, load times, search engine rankings, file sizes.

The cost and time to make a design change with a single CSS file is reduced sharply compared to changes in tables across every document of a site. I’m able to produce a CSS osCommerce site in 7 – 10 days as compared to the 21 – 42 days for an osCommerce classic site. At $30 per hour, that translates into a huge savings.

Server performance is another issue with osCommerce. Most osCommerce designers use a template system to design their osCommerce site and this increases the load on the server significantly, slowing the site down during peak hours for visitors. The alternative is to STS or some other template is to code the PHP directly and that involves wading through thousands of lines of code across hundreds of documents. Tableless CSS osCommerce has the structure grouped together on a few pages and the design — using CSS — is located on ONE page.

No templates needed. Server gets to breathe a sigh of relief.

The newest applications and blog software use tableless mark-up for one real reason: It’s better.

Marketing Stones with CSS osCommerce

We’re putting our money where our mouth is: We’re marketing our demo product, stones, to see how well our site does and we’re logging the results over time.

[Edit: On day 12, without really doing much of anything at all except posting a single link from a LiveJournal blog entry, the search "blue", "center" and "stone" comes up #1 against 163,000,000 competing pages and most of the other keywords are #1, 2 or 3. It kinda makes the experiment moot, but read on...]

Day 1 (12/19/2009):

We launched the store and started linking to it from other pages on this site. The product are a set of stones that we picked along the James River with the idea of stones that could be ’stacked’ as per our Seven Stone Logo. We painted one stone collection Blue, another Red and a third one Black.

We’ve decided to Start Day One with just a list of keywords and how our store rates with them:

Keyword: Competing Pages | Rank if in the top 10
Blue Stones: 15,900,000 | Not even in the top 100
Red Stones: 16,200,000 | Nowhere to be found
Black Stones: 42,800,000 | Ha! We’re not even bothering to look.
Blue Center Stone: 18,600,000 | Nada
Red Center Stone: 21,000,000 | Nope
Black Center Stone: 23,100,000 | Nothing
Blue Base Stone Flat: 2,370,000 | This should have been easier, but no.
Blue Base Stone Rounded: 525,000 | Ok, if we can’t sell THIS item…

As you can see, on Day 1, the results aren’t that great. Watch how the site moves up in the list over the next few weeks.